Some of you might be familiar with Amazon’s interview problem.
At some point, competitors were given problems as part of the interview.
This problem was given to future employees at Jeff Bezos’s company, bright people with degrees in math, physics, chemistry, engineering and so on.
(what is the length between the two poles if the hanging cable is 80m long, poles are 50m tall and the distance between the hanging cable and the ground is 10m?)
A piece of cake for people with degrees in math, don’t you think?
Well they started solving it straight away using tangent equations, hyperbolic functions and trigonometry.
But they all got stuck at a certain point — all of them ended up with an equation like this:
(40 + a)²/a² – (40/a)²= 1
Then their brains froze to death.
This equation has no possible solutions.
Most competitors failed; this was a timed question and they wasted their time finding the right equations just to get to a point where the problem is stuck.
Before I tell you how simply you can solve this, here’s my personal experience.
I showed this problem to my colleagues, they all tried to solve it because it sounds very interesting. We had a French class and literally everyone was busy struggling to solve the problem, getting angry and throwing away their papers.
They submitted some answers like 6 meters, 1 meter, one even told me it was 8 meters, I replied to all of them: NO.
Then I went to my math and physics teachers; they spent a whole hour trying but they eventually abandoned it. A MATH teacher failed. That surprised me a lot.
Give it a quick try right now before scrolling.
Here is what they got wrong:
Half of the cable is 40 meters long (80/2=40).
Now, notice that the pole is 50 meters tall, but the distance from the cable to the ground is 10 meters! This means that the pole is 40 meters above the cable.
If you think about it, the cable is then hanging directly downward! The whole cable is packed tight between the two poles and the distance between them is ZERO!
Amazed? This was a simple thinking problem, only basic math was needed.
Turns out Amazon wants people that think first, then go into solving problems, critical thinking was more valuable than trigonometry or any equation this time.
Go ahead and challenge your friends or anyone you know with this problem, you’ll have lots of fun seeing them struggle 😉
What exactly is boredom? It is a deeply unpleasant state of unmet arousal: we are aroused rather than despondent, but, for one or more reasons, our arousal cannot be met or directed. These reasons can be internal – often a lack of imagination, motivation or concentration – or external, such as an absence of environmental stimuli or opportunities. We want to do something engaging, but find ourselves unable to do so and, more than that, are frustrated by the rising awareness of this inability.
Awareness, or consciousness, is key, and might explain why animals, if they do get bored, generally have higher thresholds for boredom. In the words of the British writer Colin Wilson: ‘most animals dislike boredom, but man is tormented by it’. In both man and animal, boredom is induced or exacerbated by a lack of control or freedom, which is why it is so common in children and adolescents, who, in addition to being chaperoned, lack the mind furnishings – the resources, experience and discipline – to mitigate their boredom.
Let’s look more closely at the anatomy of boredom. Why is it so damned boring to be stuck in a departure lounge while our flight is increasingly delayed? We are in a state of high arousal, anticipating our imminent arrival in a novel and stimulating environment. True, there are plenty of shops, screens and magazines around, but we’re not really interested in them and, by dividing our attention, they serve only to exacerbate our boredom. To make matters worse, the situation is out of our control, unpredictable (the flight could be further delayed, or even cancelled) and inescapable. As we check and re-check the monitor, we become painfully aware of all these factors and more. And so here we are, caught in transit, in a high state of arousal that we can neither engage nor escape.
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A Preface of upcoming book “Progression Of Knowledge In Western Civilization” by Mr. Mirza Iqbal Ashraf
The word
civilization, which is a relatively recent application from eighteenth-century
when it came into currency, is generally invoked more with a rhetorical
flourish than argued within philosophical perspective. But history of knowledge
considers its true object is the study of human mind, to know what his mind has
believed, thought, and felt in diverse periods of progression of its
civilization. This also means, whereas it is important to understand today’s
world so that we can deal with our contemporary period’s civilizational
challenges, it will be incomplete if we do not assess that modernity is born
from the progress made by the knowledge of the past thinkers. But knowledge
does not arrive fully formed; it requires many minds, specifically those minds
which are free from the civilization’s religious, cultural, and geophysical
trappings.
In the Progression of
Knowledge in Western Civilization, I have expounded that even in modern
time, no knowledge is complete without
visiting the knowledge of the past, especially of the great Greek thinkers such
as, Thales, Homer, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Democritus the Atomist, Socrates,
Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and many more. In addition to the democratic
political system which is considered the best form of “government of the people
for the people by the people,” the knowledge of philosophy and sciences
appeared first of all in the fifth century before the Common Era in Greece,
which is today the hierarchy of Western Civilization. In this book, I have discussed when some other regions of the world might be familiar with
philosophy and science, in one way or another, why such a
treasure of knowledge emerged particularly in the region of Greece that became a foundation of voluminous work
of literature in almost every field of knowledge, and most interestingly, how
it amazingly flourished in the West to have made an impact in every corner of
the world that today the Western civilization is viewed as a great
civilization?
Though Islamic theology
had stemmed from a base different from the Greek traditions, the Greek
philosophy in what it could do and explain proved a temptation hard to resist
for the early Muslim theologians, philosophers, and scientific thinkers. Using
the language and culture of their religion, Muslims started exploring and
explaining ideas and arguments of Greek thought which were agreeable to Islamic
view. Since, doctrine of Neoplatonism fitted neatly into Islamic theology, it
made an overall impact on Muslim philosophy. Though Neoplatonism does not
seriously affirm the idea of a God creating out of nothing, it does emphasize
the existence of one Supreme Being out of which everything else emerges in such
a way as not to tamper with the absolute unity of the One God in Islam. When
modern philosophical thought in the West began with Rene Descartes, knowledge
of Classical Greek philosophy and science preserved and interpreted by the
Muslims had already penetrated deep into Europe. In the history of Western
philosophy, there is sufficient evidence that most of the texts written in
Arabic as well as in Hebrew during the golden era of Muslim rule, had been
translated into Latin and other languages and were made available to the
European thinkers.
I have arranged this book in four parts. Each
part postulates the hypothesis that it is “civilizing of knowledge” rather than
the traditionally abiding matrix of civilized practices of cities, nations, and
states, that Western civilization is seen as a universal civilization. Starting
from what is special about the Greeks or the region known as
Greece to have produced so powerful knowledge, that mankind even in twenty
first century is indebted to them in their great achievements in art,
literature, philosophy, general science, medicine, history, politics, ethics and
morality, and moving to the final part of the book describing that in the
Western civilization human legacy of past geniuses is being
overtaken today by the Silicon Valley’s “Robotic Geniuses.” At the same time, Progression of Knowledge in Western Civilization remains focused on
the projection of free thought, its achievement in modern secular political
theories and democratic systems, economic and social structures, scientific and
technological developments, and its heritages of diverse cultures, still
considers the importance of religious traditions. In every part of this work,
it is explained that a major role of Western civilization is to acquaint every
new generation of students, not only in learning more about the progress in
human knowledge, but also that it is because of its appeal of knowledge to
every one in every corner of the world that this civilization remains
universally alive.
Whereas some argue that the development of
Western Civilization—complete with organized mass welfare, extensive
environmental pollution, alienation, economic exploitation, and social freedom
and oppression—indicates a decline in moral values it inherited from its Greco
Roman fount, yet Western civilization, unlike some other lost civilizations, is
neither shrinking nor being destroyed. Indeed, it is losing its original getup
by being diluted and dispersed all over the globe because of its interaction
with diverse cultures and impacts of modern technology, but it is still active
and spreading by depositing its seeds of knowledge of philosophies, sciences
and new technologies. It is assisting mankind to develop a common global
culture. Its progression is being made possible by the erosion of distances
enabled by its researches and developments in modern technology, new roads,
bridges, ports, airplanes, massive container ships, fiber optic-cables and most
importantly cyber-net connectivity.1 It is all on account of human
knowledge that recently, David Attenborough has told the world leaders that
climate change could lead to the collapse of civilizations and much of the
natural world.2
I, believe my work, Progression of Knowledge in Western Civilization, is a useful
companion for all the seekers of knowledge. It will help the readers to learn
the advancement of knowledge and understand the present age by exploring the
role played by the past and present thinkers, philosophers, scientists, and
literary geniuses of the Western Civilization. I have attempted to weave
together the thoughts of most of the prominent thinkers who have appeared in
every age of human history of knowledge and have made their impact in shaping
not only the Western Civilization but also the regions beyond the Western world
over the centuries to be acknowledged as a Universal
Civilization of Knowledge.
The magnetism of modernity has remained human
being’s perennial passion. A born thinker, philosopher, scientist, and
discoverer, man has cognized to define his identity by striving incessantly to
shape it according to his contemporary period. Liberating himself from the
deterministic modes of his existence and viewing to be no more at the mercy of
biological and natural forces, he endeavors to be woven like a tapestry by his
own hands for himself. After the “First Explosion of Knowledge” which appeared
in Ancient Greece and the “Second Explosion of Knowledge” during the European
Renaissance, and experiencing the “Third Explosion of Knowledge” engendered by
the “Information Technology (IT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI),” we are
viewing the “Fourth Explosion of Knowledge,” which, with our stepping into the
“Digital Culture,” is going to establish new perspectives of philosophical and
intellectual outlook to human imagination. The Progression
of Knowledge in Western Civilization hypothesizes that, today, what is
much more important than human genius is the emerging power of Digital
Technology and Human Intelligence’s digital double the Artificial Intelligence.
